Mike Sigov: Putin bears responsibility for dismal U.S.-Russia relations

Mar. 21—U.S. Russia relations have hit the lowest point since the Cold War.

President Biden called Russian President Vladimir Putin a "killer" without a human soul, and the latter parried the accusation with an infantile uttering and recalled the Russian ambassador from Washington last week.

The point is it is none other than President Putin who is personally responsible for this sorry state of bilateral affairs.

Not only did his critics die at mysteriously high rates in Russia and abroad, but some of them died or nearly died from extravagant and extremely expensive radioactive elements or chemical substances later established to be of the Russian military make and delivered by Russian government agents.

On top of that, The Daily Beast recently reported that a money-laundering network that misappropriated $230 million of Russian state money in an elaborate tax scheme years ago is tied to Mr. Putin's massive effort to fund the chemical weapons program to produce those substances. The scheme was made public by Sergei Magnitsky — a Western-affiliated lawyer who subsequently was arrested and then died of deliberate medical inattention in Russian custody in 2009.

No wonder the Russian autocrat — who usually mixes blame-shifting with deniability when faced with accusations of effecting the deaths of his critics — chose to primarily play the fool this time by responding to Mr. Biden's statement with the Russian version of "I am rubber, you're glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you."

It also helps him shift the public attention from a recent U.S. intelligence report, according to which he had doubled down on U.S. presidential election interference on ex-President Donald Trump's side, trying to prevent Mr. Biden from getting elected.

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It also serves to distract millions of Russians facing an aggregate hardship of systemic corruption, price hikes, retirement age increases, and the coronavirus pandemic from Mr. Putin's campaign to eradicate his opposition by killing off its most prominent leaders and prosecuting everyone who as much as participates in a rally.

Enter Alexey Navalny, the head of the Russian anti-corruption movement that seeks to make elections in Russia more than a formality to perpetuate Mr. Putin's rule.

His location was unknown last week after he was moved from a detention facility, where he was placed after a Russian kangaroo court replaced his probation sentence on a manufactured corruption charge with a prison sentence. That's after the Russian government (read Mr. Putin) nearly succeeded in poisoning him with a nerve agent.

And if that doesn't convince you that President Biden's description of Mr. Putin was both accurate and well overdue, look at the circumstances that Mr. Putin manufactured to grab power more than 20 years ago.

Mr. Putin's critics have also blamed him for having Russian secret police blow up apartment buildings in Moscow in 1999 to justify a massive military operation against the cessationist Chechnya and a resulting wave of nationalism that he then rode to consolidate his personal power. Some of the critics later died under mysterious circumstances.

As Mr. Putin's transgressions against his own people, neighboring countries, and world democracy in general gained effectiveness and scale, the United States largely responded with permissiveness and appeasement.

Since the start of Russian military aggression in Ukraine in 2014, however, a series of increasingly punishing Russian sanctions have been introduced, falling short, nevertheless, of hitting Mr. Putin personally and in the most sensitive spot: his pocket.

Most recently, the Biden Administration has issued sanctions that punished not only the institutions and top government officials involved in the Navalny poisoning, but also a couple of Russian oligarchs close to Mr. Putin.

However, they left out a few oligarchs, though Mr. Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation listed them in an open letter to President Biden as critical in propping up the Putin regime.

It is time for the United States to stop pulling its punches and sanction all the oligarchs Mr. Putin uses to secure his power base at home and sponsor subversive activities abroad, including in the United States.

Mike Sigov, a former Russian journalist in Moscow, is a U.S. citizen and a staff writer at The Blade. Contact him at sigov@theblade.com or on Twitter @mikesigovblade.